Archives for August 2012

As the Paralympics gets under way, I will be asking whether the disability rights movement can live up to the Paralympic spirit? Because It seems to me that far from encouraging people with disabilities to overcome the disadvantages they face, it has increasingly become little more than a variant of today’s stifling politics of pity. While there is much to complain about today, there is no problem so big that it can’t be made worse by the imperatives of competitive victimhood. There are no end of people claiming to be very badly done by, or should I say no end of campaigners and commentators claiming to speak on their behalf.

Whether its as victims of public sector cuts or the apparent excesses of capitalism, some are seemingly little more than the objects of other’s pity. This is particularly the case if you happen to have a disability. According to Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC: ‘No group of people is more affected by the government’s savage, ideological austerity than disabled workers.’ But it is not austerity that represents the biggest assault on people with disabilities. Rather it is the way that disabled people are portrayed by Barber and others that is most troubling of all. Not least by their supposed defenders. From the cuts to welfare to the closure of Remploy factories it is the disabled, we are told, who are the most pitiable. A high profile campaign organised by the Disability Benefits Consortium and the UK Disabled People’s Council leaves us in no doubt that they are The Hardest Hit.

Like I say, there is much to complain about. As Claudia Wood writes for Demos: ‘Disabled people are disproportionately reliant both on welfare benefits and public services’. Not only are 3.5 million people currently claiming cut-threatened disability-related benefits, Wood reminds us, many are also seeing the care services they rely on threatened by 28% cuts to local authority budgets. So the last thing I want to do is diminish the difficulties that people with disabilities are facing now more than ever. Quite the opposite. I will try to show over a series of blog posts here and in the Huffington Post, that it is only by challenging the diminishing of disabled people themselves, that the assault on their standard of living and on the quality of care they receive can be challenged.

‘Nudge’, a book written by American academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in 2008, was eagerly devoured by the UK’s ideas-lite apolitical elite at the time. And has become the reference-point for policy wonks intent on changing people’s behaviour ever since. For those of you who haven’t read it, the authors describe their ideal as a situation whereby so-called ‘choice architects’ go about ‘attempting to move people in directions that will make their lives better’. They don’t talk too much about the validity of making that judgement or who should make it but you can rest assured that it isn’t you and I.

Of course, nudging came as second nature to politicians who, like Baroness Neuberger, chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, already believed that behaviour change is ‘one of the key things that government’s do’. Indeed, so eagerly received was it by those already obsessively intervening in the minutiae of people’s lives – but lacking a supposedly scientific justification for doing so – that few questioned the contradictions involved. For instance, how could they – so wedded to the idea of the Big Society, localism and the extension of ever more ‘people power’ – also support an ethos that seeks to make decisions for people? And how could nudging be both Libertarian and Paternalist as Thaler and Sunstein incoherently claimed?

Nudging is a ‘relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism’, they maintain, at least compared with what went before, and therefore freedom-loving types should welcome it. They argue, for instance, that instead of government’s banning junk food, supermarkets should arrange their food displays in a way that encourages healthy eating. But is this really any better than explicit state paternalism? I don’t think so. The fact that this type of behaviour control is designed to sneak below our radars actually makes it more not less intrusive, in as far as it more effectively intrudes upon our autonomy and our capacity to run our own lives according to our own choices freely made.

The reality of behaviour change is worse still. In a report published by Neuberger’s committee on behaviour change, we learn that the behavioural scientism of nudging isn’t enough to make us change our ways. There need to be a ‘wider array of interventions’, she says, including the old-fashioned imposition of regulations and legislation that Thaler and Sunstein’s approach was supposed to nudge aside. They went further still recommending that the coalition-created and Orwellian-sounding Behaviour Insights Team installed at the Cabinet Office – and otherwise known as the Nudge Unit – should have its stay extended beyond its intended two years. This will give it more time to evaluate the efficacy of state interventions in the nation’s behaviour.

The authors of the British Academy report Nudging Citizens Towards Localism? acknowledge a ‘possible tension’ presented by the new behaviour change paradigm. But again it is one of means – how best to change people’s behaviour – not ends – whether it is a legitimate thing to do in the first place. They only ask whether a decentralised nudge is ‘a more legitimate and self-sustaining form of behaviour change’ than one driven by central government diktat. Either way, there need to be ‘more experiments’ apparently ‘to encourage behaviour change and citizen participation in public decisions’. They want to develop ‘interventions that, as well as nudging citizens, encourage them to think’. Something that we apparently don’t already do. At least not to their satisfaction.

That this is patronising and illiberal should go without saying. But the doublespeak is something else. The more we become objects of behaviour-led policy interventions, the freer we are as citizens and the more legitimate are the decisions we make. So say the behaviour-changers.

The past couple of weeks have been a once-in-a-lifetime treat as we’ve witnessed the spectacle of incredible sporting feats performed by the world’s greatest athletes on our very own doorstep. Indeed, as a resident of E17 I was only a javelin throw away (or so) from the action. I was lucky enough to get tickets to see the legendary Usain Bolt in the 200m heats at the majestic Olympic Stadium and gold medalists Nicola Adams and Katie Taylor in action at the Excel Centre.

Meanwhile, far from joining in the celebrations or marvelling at the extraordinary spectacle of the London 2012 Olympics; the behaviour-police achieved new lows in unfounded and unrelentinglymiserable opportunism. The Games became an unlikely vehicle for tackling everything from child obesity to climate change. We were told that what might look like sports fans were in fact sex tourists exploiting young immigrant women; or drink-fuelled domestic abusers, and carriers of sexually transmitted diseases and a potential flu pandemic.

Neville Rigby, convenor of the highly dubious sounding International Obesity Forum wrote a piece for The Guardian in which he claimed: ‘the Olympic dream is a nightmare that ignores the reality of today’s obesity epidemic’ by allowing ‘peddlers of junk food’ to sponsor the event. That’s Cadbury and Coca Cola to you and me. ‘Successive governments’, he continued, are guilty of ‘swallowing the big food companies’ mantra that healthy eating is all about personal choice’. If that’s the case, then along with the occasional dairy cream egg and diet coke, Neville … so am I!

Rigby was seemingly outraged that anybody, especially an evil multinational, should contradict the received wisdom of the government’s Change4Life campaign. But he shouldn’t have worried. Its instructions for healthy living were given a new lease of life with the Games4Life campaign. Apparently concerned that we might be enjoying ourselves too much this summer with Euro 2012 and then the Olympics of all things keeping us entertained, 2.6 million activity packs were reportedly distributed in an attempt to get people off their well-worn sofas.

For all the hysterical nonsense about how are lives are ruled by the ‘peddlers’ of fizzy drinks and chocolate bars, it is in reality the political class and the state who are really worth worrying about. It is they, and their hectoring friends who are treating us like naughty school children who don’t know what’s good for us. For instance, health secretary Andrew Lansley is reportedly supportive of the so-called ‘make every contact count‘ plan. As Professor Steve Field, chair of the NHS Future Forum explains: ‘A routine dental checkup or eye test … is a chance to offer advice to help someone stop smoking … Collecting medication from a pharmacy is a chance to offer someone help with cutting down on alcohol. A pre-surgery checkup is an opportunity to talk over concerns about smoking, diet and physical activity.’

Is it really any surprise that ‘lifestyle rationing’ is beginning to undermine the notion that all are equally deserving of care and treatment in the NHS, when the medical profession are being urged to take an unhealthy interest in the way people choose to live their lives? When asked byDoctors.net.uk ‘Should the NHS be allowed to refuse non-emergency treatments to patients unless they lose weight or stop smoking?’ over half of doctors responded yes.

Amid all this self-righteous puritanical anti-Olympic spirit I was disappointed to have missed what must have been a laugh at the behaviour-changers expense. The Fattylympics featured the actor who played Roland in children’s TV series Grange Hill back in the 1980s. With events including ‘Rolling with Roland’, ‘Chub-robics’ and ‘Spitting on the Body Mass Index Chart’, it was the kind of irreverent, sacred-cow slaughtering stunt that autonomy advocates like myself would like to see more of.

As far as I’m concerned when it comes to our behaviour government doesn’t have a role. But, more to the point, why all the talk about ‘changing our behaviour’ in the first place? The very language is degrading. As I told the audience, you and I are not laboratory rats that exhibit this or that behaviour. We are citizens; we make up a civil society. We live in what is generally understood to be a liberal democracy. The role of government is to represent us. To come up with a set of ideas. To help to shape society for the better. To lead us out of economic crisis or maybe tackle the crippling problem of welfare dependency. Of course it has fallen short of such expectations. But that doesn’t mean it should tell us how to behave instead.

And yet the policing of people’s behaviour has come to fill a hole where politics used to be. The politics of left and right has given way to endless lectures about our right and wrong behaviours. Whether its public services creating better citizens, public health zealots telling us we need to change our lifestyles or no-less zealous environmental campaigners claiming that putting the right bit of rubbish in the right colour wheelie bin will save the planet … we are forever being told to behave ourselves.

Even the shocking scenes of unruly youth setting fire to their own communities in last summer’s riots are understood through the prism of behaviour. Barely before the smoke had cleared these unprecedented events were being used as a pretext for intervening in the poor parenting and anti-social behaviour of an improbable sounding 120,000 ‘problem’ families. But surely this summer’s celebration of the seemingly superhuman sporting achievements we call the Olympics is immune to the demeaning interventions of the behaviour-changers? As my next blog for the Huffington Post will explain … far from it!

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the public policyagenda today. While on the one hand we are urged to build a big society where citizens run things for themselves, on the other we are told to ‘nudge’ them in this or that direction and make decisions on their behalf.

Something odd has happened to public services over the past decade or so. Services that were once a part of the social settlement that led to the creation of the welfare state, have increasingly become a tool for telling people how to behave. Whether it’s creating better citizens or trying to change their lifestyles, the only question raised is how best to do it.

The government’s approach to recycling is to fund local initiatives rewarding good residents with points redeemable at local retailers. “We want to see people helping us to boost recycling rates by putting out their rubbish correctly,” said environment secretary Caroline Spelman as she launched a public consultation on the matter, “but bullying them with fines is not the way to do it.” Opponents, particularly local authorities none too keen on reverting to the weekly bin collection, only object that scarce public funds would be better spent on other behaviour-controlling initiatives such as the cuts-threatened SureStart centres.

The world of social care, while rhetorically in favour of more independence, choice and control, for its users, is obsessed with vetting the behaviour of staff, volunteers, or anybody else that might come into contact with a vulnerable child or adult. The NHS, of Olympic opening ceremony fame, may be free at the point of use. But no expense is spared on posters in GP surgeries and hospital waiting rooms telling patients that they must change their lifestyles – stop smoking, exercise more, lose weight – or to remind expectant mothers that ‘breast is best’.

Housing associations are as busy managing the lives of their tenants as they are managing the housing stock and more interested in building communities than building new homes. Schools apparently cater more to the contents of children’s school dinners and lunchboxes and managing misbehaviour in the classroom, than filling young people’s minds with something that might encourage them to sit still for a moment. Meanwhilea mass movement co-ordinator for the Olympic and Paralympic Games’ opening and closing ceremonies is apparently using dance – in consultation with the Metropolitan Police and the Criminal Justice Board – to reduce youth crime.

Indeed for those driving public policy today the delivery of public services is not the point. It is all about shaping new ‘active citizens’ the better to meet corporate objectives. But surely this gets things back to front? A truly active citizen acts of their own accord and not according to the imperatives of public management. The good news is that by ditching the policing of people’s behaviour we might emulate the vision of a big society in which responsible citizens take the reins. This is why we should adopt an alternative approach: one that genuinely enables people’s autonomy rather than smothering their initiative.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.